I'm just as much of an avid llm code generator fan as you may be but I do wonder about the practicality of spending time making projects anymore.
Why build them if other can just generate them too, where is the value of making so many projects?
If the value is in who can sell it the best to people who can't generate it, isn't it just a matter of time before someone else will generate one and they may become better than you at selling it?
> Why build them if other can just generate them too, where is the value of making so many projects?
No offence to anyone but these generated projects are nothing ground-breaking. As soon as you venture outside the usual CRUD apps where novelty and serious engineering is necessary, the value proposition of LLMs drops considerably.
For example, I'm exploring a novel design for a microkernel, and I have no need for machine generated boilerplate, as most of the hard work is not implementing yet another JSON API boilerplate, but it's thinking very hard with pen and paper about something few have thought before, and even fewer LLMs have been trained on, and have no intelligence to ponder upon the material.
To be fair, even for the most dumb side-projects, like the notes app I wrote for myself, there is still a joy in doing things by hand, because I do not care about shipping early and getting VC money.
Weird, because I've created a webcam app that does segmentation so they can delete the background and put a new background in I mean, I suppose that's not groundbreaking. But it's not just reading and writing to a database.
I've just added a ATA over Ethernet server in Rust, I thought of doing it in the car on the way home and an hour later I've got a working version.
I type this comment using a voice to text system I built, admittedly it uses Whisper as the transcriber but I've turned it into a personal assistant.
I make stuff every day I just wouldn't bother to make if I had to do it myself. and on top of that it does configuration. So I've had it build full wireguard configs that is taking on our pay addresses so that different destinations cause different routing. I don't know how to do that off the top of my head. I'm not going to spend weeks trying to find out how it works. It took me an evening of prompting.
> I make stuff every day I just wouldn't bother to make if I had to do it myself
> I'm not going to spend weeks trying to find out how it works.
Then what is the point? For some of us, programming is an art form. Creativity is an art form and an ideal to strive towards. Why have a machine to create something we wouldn’t care about?
The only result is a devaluation to zero of actual effort and passion, whose only beneficiary are those that only care about creating more “product”. Sure, you can pump out products with little effort now, all the while making a few ultrabilionaires richer. Good for you, I guess.
The value is that we need a lot more software and now, because building software has gotten so much less time consuming, you can sell software to people that could/would not have paid for it previously at a different price point.
We don’t need more software, we need the right software implemented better. That’s not something LLMs can possibly give us because they’re fucking pachinko machines.
Here’s a hint: Nobody should ever write a CRUD app, because nobody should ever have to write a CRUD app; that’s something that can be generated fully and deterministically (i.e. by a set of locally-executable heuristics, not a goddamn ocean-boiling LLM) from a sufficiently detailed model of the data involved.
In the 1970s you could wire up an OS-level forms library to your database schema and then serve literally thousands of users from a system less powerful than the CPU in modern peripheral or storage controller. And in less RAM too.
People need to take a look at what was done before in order to truly have a proper degree of shame about how things are being done now.
Most CRUD software development is not really about the CRUD part. And for most framework, you can find packages that generate the UI and the glue code that ties it to the database.
When you're doing CRUD, you're spending most of the time with the extra constraints designed by product. It's dealing with the CRUD events, the IAM system, the Notification system,...
> That’s not something LLMs can possibly give us because they’re fucking pachinko machines.
I mostly agree, but I do find them useful for fuzzing out tests and finding issues with implementations. I have moved away from larger architectural sketches using LLMs because over larger time scales I no longer find they actually save time, but I do think they're useful for finding ways to improve correctness and safety in code.
It isn't the exciting and magical thing AI platforms want people to think it is, and it isn't indispensable, but I like having it handy sometimes.
The key is that it still requires an operator who knows something is missing, or that there are still improvements to be made, and how to suss them out. This is far less likely to occur in the hands of people who don't know, in which case I agree that it's essentially a pachinko machine.
I’m with you. Anyone writing in anything higher level than assembly, with anything less than the optimization work done by the demo scene, should feel great same.
Down with force-multiplying abstractions! Down with intermediate languages and CPU agnostic binaries! Down with libraries!
Why build them if other can just generate them too, where is the value of making so many projects?
If the value is in who can sell it the best to people who can't generate it, isn't it just a matter of time before someone else will generate one and they may become better than you at selling it?